19th Century

Today, when people think of Nintendo the first things that come to mind are consoles such as the Wii and the Switch. Maybe popular video games come to mind also such as Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and of course Pokemon. However, the Nintendo company came into being way before the electronic age that spawned such pleasurable pastimes. In ...

The body of a homeless prostitute, brutally murdered and mutilated, is discovered in a Whitechapel backstreet It was raining as the bells of London were ringing out the last day of August in the year 1888. The air smelled like thunder was coming, which wasn’t unusual, as the Summer of 1888 had been one of the wettest in memory. A ...

Coming in at a mere 278 words, the Gettysburg Address is one of the most famous speeches ever given by anyone, not just by an American president. At the time President Abraham Lincoln gave it, he thought it was never going to amount to much, but the years since have told a different account. There are five copies known to ...

During the Industrial Revolution and in the subsequent years before worker protection laws were put into place, it was a matter of course that profits were placed before people. When coupled with the dangerous occupation of mining, one is left with a recipe for disaster. In Blantyre, Scotland in the wee hours of the morning of 22 October 1877, over ...

Profits, government protection, and international trade – who would have thought that all of this would be generated by one small grain? In the United Kingdom in the early to mid-1800s it was necessary to protect the price of corn to defend all of the above. The Corn Laws were an effort by the Tory government to protect the crop, ...

Though dark days have dotted all of history, the US Civil War Battle of Antietam, also called the Battle of Sharpsburg, surely ranks as one of the darkest. More Americans died on this day than on any other day in the country’s history. Taking place over three days in from September 16 to September 18, 1862 in Maryland, the battle ...

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